Founder

Australian College

Member

New South Wales Legislative Council

Upper house of the New South Wales Parliament, which started as an appointed council of advisers to the Governor and has gradually become more diverse and democratic. Since the introduction of responsible government and the Legislative Assembly, the Council has served as a house of review.

Revd John Dunmore Lang, DD, AM, for upwards of fifty years minister of the Scots Church, Sydney 1873

Blackheath

Gundungurra people knew and travelled through the area of Blackheath before the Europeans came. The town grew from the 1830s as a resting place for travellers over the Blue Mountains, first by road and then by rail after 1868. Land sales in the 1880s led to population growth, and growing interest in walking tracks spurred development in the early twentieth century, when Blackheath became a holiday town.

Education

Education in Sydney started with Aboriginal society and the everyday learning and formal initiation of young Aboriginal people. Institutionalised education came with the Europeans, who first created schools for convicts' children, and later for the children of the new gentry and middle classes. Sydney became the centre of education in the colony, with a university, and eventually in 1880, universal education throughout the suburbs of the growing city.

English

Sydney has been seen as an 'English' town since first European settlement, with visitors describing its English character well into the nineteenth century. Successive waves of English-born convicts, settlers, and assisted immigrants helped shape the city, and the English remain the largest overseas-born group.

Fort Denison

Originally a rocky island used as a place of punishment for convicts, Fort Denison was built over and renamed when fortifications were constructed there in the mid-nineteenth century in an attempt to protect the city from seaborne invasion. Though the fort was never used for that purpose, it has collected tidal and meteorological information since it was built.

Haberfield

Australia's first 'model suburb', from 1901 Haberfield was to help define how Australians sought to house themselves. It is now also a hub of Sydney's Italian community.

Religion

Religion has had a profound influence on the geography, culture, politics, and artistic life of Sydney. While religion has mostly been a conservative force, preserving traditions transported from home societies, it has also reflected the setting and people of Sydney, its harbour, bushland and suburbs.

Scots

Scots have been in Sydney from earliest European contact, with Forby Sutherland, a young Scottish crew member on the Endeavour, buried at Sutherland in 1770. Scots have played important roles in all facets of Sydney's history. While the Scots can seem to be 'invisible immigrants', without a clearly distinctive culture, Scottish professions, industry, religion and education have been influential in Sydney's development since the arrival of the First Fleet.

St Stephen's Presbyterian church Macquarie Street

This interwar Gothic building, opened in 1935, became the home of Sydney's oldest Presbyterian congregation, after the extension of Martin Place to Macquarie Street led to the demolition of the previous St Stephen's in Phillip Street.

Stanmore

Cadigal people walked the ridge line, which later became Stanmore Road, before the Europeans arrived. The land was granted to officers of the New South Wales Corps in 1792, and became farms, orchards and grazing land. Subdivided in the 1880s and 1890s, Stanmore developed around the railway station with Victorian villas and Federation houses. In the twentieth century, the suburb's fortunes declined, but by the 1970s gentrification was beginning to change Stanmore again.

Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts

Founded in 1833 on the model of Scottish Mechanics' Institutes, the SMSA sought to provide further education for working men through lectures, classes and a library. Many of Sydney's foremost intellectuals, inventors and innovators were associated with it, and it influenced the development of both the University of Sydney and technical education in New South Wales. It still provides a library and lectures to Sydneysiders in 2009.

Wynyard Park

Once a parade ground for the army barracks, Wynyard Park has been open space since before Europeans arrived. During the second half of the nineteenth century it was an elegant residential square with a park in the middle. From the 1880s, it has been a public transport hub.

Yasmar

Yasmar is a rare surviving example of a mid-nineteenth century great house and garden. The estate had only three owners before it was transferred to government control during World War II, and has been empty since 1994.

Hero of Waterloo hotel

Built in 1844, the Hero was linked to tales of smuggling and press-ganging in Millers Point's maritime past, but its history is more commercial than criminal.

The School of Arts movement

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about 140 schools of arts or mechanics' institutes were established in Sydney by volunteers. They were independent community organisations, assisted by a small government subsidy, and they thrived as centres of local community life. Today, their legacy in Sydney is more than just the surviving buildings. Out of these humble voluntary operations developed the local public library, the modern community or neighbourhood centre, and formal systems of adult and technical education.

Wilshire, James Robert

Sydney's second mayor was a prosperous tanner with radical views.

Thornton, George

The son of a convict, George Thornton became powerful in municipal and colonial politics.

Carmichael, Henry

Reverend, educationist, winemaker and activist, Henry Carmichael influenced education and public life in the colony for 30 years.

Death and dying in nineteenth century Sydney

In the newly settled colony, cemeteries were an important cultural institution in which the social order could be established and a person's identity within the community could be defined. Through the trappings of the funeral, statements of status, class and religion were constructed and inscribed upon the cemetery landscape.

Islands of Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour once had 14 islands. These were outcrops and the peaks of steep hills left uncovered as the sea level rose, between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, flooding an ancient river valley and forming the harbour that exists today

Henry Louis Bertrand

Henry Louis Bertrand, the mad dentist of Wynyard Square, was the centre of a salacious love triangle and murder trial in Sydney in 1865.

Boatswain Maroot

Boatswain Maroot was born about 1793 at the Cooks River (Gumannan) near Botany, the son of Maroot the elder (c1773-1817) of the Gameygal people that occupied the north shore of Kamay (Botany Bay), and Grang Grang. The son would lead a very different life to that of his parents. He gained the nickname ‘Boatswain’ or ‘Bosun’ as a young man, sailing on English ships in sealing and whaling voyages to Macquarie Island in the sub-Antarctic and the New Zealand ‘whale fisheries’, before returning to live at Botany Bay on land leased to him by the colonial government.